A Major-League Divorce

Jamie and Frank McCourt moved to L.A. in 2004 to live their dream—as owners of the illustrious Dodgers—then went on a massive spending spree: $74 million on four homes, a $12 million pool, and a $10,000-a-month hairstylist. But though their team hit an initial winning streak, their marriage cratered. With their divorce producing a slew of unsavory financial details, Vanessa Grigoriadis learns why Major League Baseball is as furious as the McCourts are with each other.

Dodger Stadium was built almost 50 years ago, yet it remains one of the most elegant sport venues. Set in Chavez Ravine, overlooking Los Angeles’s downtown on one side and the verdant mountains of the San Gabriels on the other, the ballpark, with its house organist, foot-long Dodger dogs, and old-timey sports announcers, is a place where the American Dream is still palpable. Families relish their cotton candy and popcorn, hand-crank machines stamp pennies with pictures of Dodger Stadium, and the boys in blue down in the dugout do their best, which is often pretty good. This is one of the most storied teams in baseball: not only one of the first teams to move west, but the proud organization that made history smashing the sport’s prejudices by hiring Sandy Koufax, the pitching great who refused to play on Yom Kippur because he was Jewish; Fernando Valenzuela, the Mexican player who stoked Fernandomania in the 80s; and, most famously, Jackie Robinson, the second-baseman who broke baseball’s color line when he debuted with the team, in 1947.

On a warm evening this spring, the Dodgers played the San Francisco Giants, their longtime division rivals since both teams had relocated to California. It was the kind of evening when one would have expected to see Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and a dozen pals in the seats he reserves for his personal use, to the near right of the dugout. But this night, McCourt—a 57-year-old with the woebegone look of a Flemish portrait—had made himself scarce, and there was certainly no sign of Jamie, his ex-wife, with whom he has been embroiled in one of the most expensive divorces in California history, at nearly $20 million in attorneys’ fees. “Frank’s probably here, but not in the open anymore,” said a television reporter, waving a hand to take in the expanse of the stadium. “Nuh-uh, not now. I bet he’s hiding somewhere.”

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You would almost pity the man if he weren’t such a scoundrel, or a schlemiel, depending on your perspective. Always with a fine suit on, his thin lips moving constantly as they work their way into some new sort of trouble, he’s been owner of the team for seven years, since he blew into town with Jamie, his tense, skinny Chihuahua of a wife who favors a look that could be described as Real Housewives Business Casual—tight navy skirts, highlighted blond hair, and enormous handbags. Los Angeles was initially welcoming of them, as it is of anyone with money, but when it became clear that they were using one of the city’s biggest franchises—part of what put Los Angeles on the map as a world-class destination—to pay their personal expenses, among other shenanigans, the ire in the normally placid city exploded. The McCourt breakup and financial problems with the team are covered by newspapers here as sensationally as the decay of the Wilpon dynasty—the owners of the Mets, who are now selling a minority ownership to a hedge-fund manager—is in New York. The Dodgers and the Mets are each thought to be well over $400 million in debt.

To all appearances, Frank McCourt seems essentially broke—although he is living in a $30,000-a-month suite at the Montage hotel—and struggling to pay the team’s bills. And, most of all, he has apparently angered Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, so deeply that Selig has taken control of the team’s finances, effective in April. Baseball is essentially a monopoly of 30 teams run by Selig, who, while once beset by steroid scandals and the labor strike that canceled the World Series in 1994, has proven himself in recent years to be insuperable. “Selig is able to wrangle a room of 30 disparate billionaires, who either got their teams through nepotism, or because they’re young entrepreneurs who made billions and thought it would be cool to own a sports team, or have owned their teams for 50 years, and get them all to vote with him,” says Will Leitch, the founder of the sports blog Deadspin. “Part of how that’s happened is that Selig has ‘his guys’ in the ownership booth. And I think it’s fair to say that Frank McCourt is no longer one of his guys.”

In late April, Selig appointed Tom Schieffer, a onetime head of the Texas Rangers and former U.S. ambassador to Japan and Australia, as the trustee of the Dodgers, giving him the power to approve any checks above $5,000. (At a press conference, Schieffer dryly noted that his experience dealing with North Korea would help him work alongside McCourt.) A deafening chorus has demanded that Frank sell the team. “I could take the money and run but that’s not my goal,” he claimed, furious about Major League Baseball’s intrusion, which he initially called “un-American.” “I’ve been humbled. I’ve been humiliated. I’ve been embarrassed…. I have a reputation now to restore.”

But this reputation may be permanently marred, and no one is quite sure how much money there will be to “take and run” after Frank’s tenure as owner of the Dodgers is through. Then again, no one thought he would be able to make the $9.8 million payroll for the last two weeks of May, but he slipped in just under the deadline, extracting cash from Dodger sponsors by offering them discounts on their bills and luxury box seats, according to ESPN. (Frank denies this.) And he made the mid-June payroll, too. “There’s been a deathwatch for Frank for months now, but it seems like he has more than nine lives,” says a source close to the situation. “He’s running out of places to find money, but he still keeps pulling a rabbit out of the hat.” The source laughs. “It doesn’t really matter, though. Frank is a carcass on the ground at this point, and M.L.B. is the buzzard circling the body. It’s not a question of whether he’s going to have to give up the Dodgers—it’s a question of when.”

The Bostonians

This story started long ago, in a city far from Los Angeles. Frank came from Boston, where his large Irish family has run a successful construction company for four generations. He met Jamie Luskin, the Jewish daughter of a middle-class appliance-chain owner from Baltimore—“the cheapest guy in town,” or so claimed Jack Luskin’s ads—in the 1970s at Georgetown University, where he majored in economics and she in French. (She would later get a law degree, and an M.B.A. from M.I.T.) Jamie’s parents didn’t approve of her dating a Catholic and didn’t attend the wedding, presided over by a rabbi, at Frank and Jamie’s Manhattan apartment, in 1979. Shortly after, Frank decided they should move back to Boston, where they had four boys (Drew, Travis, Casey, and Gavin, all of whom are now in their 20s) in quick succession while she worked as a real-estate and family-law attorney. Throughout their marriage, they remained professional and personal partners, enjoying each other’s natural intelligence and craftiness in business. Life was about the kids and making money, and compromises were rarely made with one party feeling slighted.

Frank, whom an acquaintance describes as a “short Harvey Weinstein type, with a lot of aggressive energy and never sure exactly what to say,” worked briefly for his family, but soon left to try his hand at real-estate development, with Jamie eventually acting as general counsel for the business. Some of his gambits were failures, like a $25 million waterfront entertainment site in Baltimore that closed within a year, but others, like the conversion of Union Wharf on Boston Harbor into a mixed-use area with town houses, led to more opportunities.

The McCourts were a formidable business team, unafraid to use lawsuits to pursue their interests: they litigated against business associates, the state of Massachusetts, as well as the contractors for their $16 million mansion in Brookline, one of the most expensive homes in the state. (They also bought a $19.5 million estate on 100 acres on Cape Cod, a smaller home on the Willowbend golf course nearby, and a $6 million ski condo in Vail.) Business tactics always carry some risk, though, and after a lien was taken out on the Brookline house and a sheriff came to the door to collect the debt, Jamie was so upset that the couple, according to court documents, sheltered their non-business assets from their business creditors by putting their homes in her name only.

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South Boston in the 1980s was an urban wasteland, but Frank had the foresight to spend $8 million for a 24-acre plot on the waterfront, the onetime rail yard for the defunct Penn Central Transportation. This property became the basis of the couple’s fortune, but as far as turning it into anything that might actually improve the lives of Bostonians—there’s scant evidence of that. For years, the McCourts ran around town with slide shows and promotional materials, claiming they were going to create a “New Boston,” with the elegance of Back Bay, featuring landscaped public plazas, and grand thoroughfares to the waterfront. “It is an amazing opportunity. It is the intellectual opportunity, the legacy opportunity, the family opportunity to try to contribute to what is best for the city: it is so mega,” Jamie said in 1998.

Nevertheless, the South Boston land remained commuter parking lots, with more than 2,000 spaces in all. “Few in this town have talked the talk more and walked the walk less,” Boston Globe columnist Steve Bailey said of Frank on the eve of his 2004 purchase of the Dodgers. (Bailey jokingly encouraged readers to send in money to “help our parking lot attendant realize his dream of owning a major league team.”)

Frank and Jamie wanted to be more than parking attendants, of course. They loved baseball—Frank’s grandfather had been a part owner of the Boston Braves, and Jamie, a Baltimore Orioles fan and a jock in school, has claimed that when she was nine years old she told her parents she would own a baseball team someday. In 2001, when the Red Sox came up for sale, the couple competed with Charles Dolan, the founder of Cablevision, and others for the team; they were far less flush than the competition, but they thought their land, where a new Fenway Park could be built, might be enticing. The owners, however, didn’t want to swap the team for a parking lot, so the McCourts were forced to look elsewhere, considering a purchase of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. And then the Dodgers came up for sale.

The Dodgers are considered one of six or seven marquee franchises in baseball, and it is important for the sport that they be in good hands. They were founded in Brooklyn, in 1883, but left the city 75 years later. The O’Malley family, which owned a stake in the team from the 1940s until the 1990s, had wanted to move from their small and outdated ballpark at Ebbets Field to a plot of land on the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues (in fact, just about the same location where the New Jersey Nets are building their new arena). When city-planning autocrat Robert Moses refused their entreaties, offering them instead some land at the 1939 World’s Fair Grounds in Queens, the O’Malleys accepted an offer from Los Angeles to bring the team west. L.A. had promised the family that they’d have the opportunity to build a new Dodger stadium, which they’d own, on the remains of a Mexican-American community called Chavez Ravine, which had been razed a few years prior for federal public housing. The housing project was put on hold during the 1950s Red Scare, when various parties lobbied to cancel the “socialist” enterprise.

In any case, by 2003 the Dodgers had passed from the O’Malleys to the Fox Entertainment Group subsidiary of News Corp., which had bought the team for $311 million five years earlier. Fox didn’t seem to care much about the team—Murdoch wasn’t a fan and had never been to the stadium—but it felt it needed to block Disney (which owned the Angels, the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, and ESPN) from gaining momentum for a new regional sports network. Fox spent money on the Dodgers, but they were difficult owners from the beginning, making poor decisions, such as trading away catcher Mike Piazza and awarding the sport’s first $100 million contract to Kevin Brown, a pitcher who ended up disappointing fans. The Dodgers finished out of the playoffs during all six years of Fox’s ownership.

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When Disney lost interest in building the sports network a few years later, Fox apparently didn’t see much reason to stay in the baseball business—the Dodgers had been losing money, about $50 million a year. But there were few serious parties for Fox’s $430 million price tag. Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad dipped a toe in, but Murdoch had already warmed to the notion of working with the McCourts, possibly because he thought they would be easier to negotiate with over future TV deals.

The McCourts were willing to pay close to the price Fox wanted, about $421 million, and Fox didn’t seem to care how they got to that number, even if the financing was about as creative as the mortgage for a Miami condominium in 2006. Of the total, Fox gave the McCourts about $71 million in loans due in a few years, plus a two-year $125 million loan that used their Boston seaport property as collateral. (Fox also agreed to eventually credit $50 million of the purchase price.) Under these terms, the McCourts had to come up with only $225 million more—and they reportedly borrowed at least $125 million of that sum, too. That would mean they put $100 million in cash in the deal, but few people think they were able to front even that much. In fact, Frank’s lawyer, Steve Susman, has reportedly said that Frank put “not a penny” into the deal.

In other words, the McCourts likely bought the Dodgers team, the stadium property, the team’s spring-training facility, and the surrounding parking lots (comprising almost 300 acres of land to the east of Echo Park, a newly gentrified neighborhood of hipsters a few miles from Downtown L.A.) for less than the price of an oceanfront home in Southampton.

How the West Was Lost

Now that the McCourts had accomplished this astonishing swap, they decided it was time to put their noses to the grindstone … and do more shopping. The first thing they wanted was a slew of new homes. As usual, the couple decided to put them in Jamie’s name. In fact, since any property that is jointly held in a marriage in California is assumed to be shared equally between both spouses, their lawyers drew up a post-nuptial agreement upon their move to L.A. to protect assets. Any homes would remain in Jamie’s name, and the Dodgers, and some other property, would stay solely in Frank’s.

Soon, the McCourts had an 11,637-square-foot villa in Holmby Hills, across the street from the Playboy Mansion, bought for $21.3 million, followed six months later by an adjacent French-country fixer-upper of 8,385 square feet, for $6.5 million. They bought land in Cabo San Lucas, for $4.7 million, as well as a $7.7 million lot at the Yellowstone Club, the super-exclusive ski and golf resort in Montana. For beach homes, they purchased a John Lautner-designed house in Malibu, called the Segel residence, from Courteney Cox and David Arquette for $27.3 million. They took the beachfront bungalow next door, too—after all, it was only $19 million. In court papers, Jamie said that they used the bungalow to house an overflow of guests from time to time and do extra laundry.

They spent millions on renovations, shipping the kitchen from the Brookline home to the bigger Holmby Hills house, at a cost of $180,000. They spent $12.4 million to rip out the tennis courts and build an Olympic-size indoor-pool complex, including a poolhouse, a sauna, and massage rooms. (The house already had an outdoor pool, as did the Lautner house, but Jamie felt those were not suitable for the kind of long-distance swimming she liked to do.)

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That’s not all. They changed their Net-Jets account from Citations to the larger Gulfstreams, logging more than 250 hours a year on the jets over two years at $12,500 an hour. They hired a driver and a private security staff, at a cost of over $800,000 a year. In 2007, the Dodgers paid $400,000 to an employee to oversee one of the team’s charities, which had only a $1.6 million annual budget. (The Dodgers later repaid the money to the charity, after the California attorney general began an investigation.) An e-mail presented in court said the Bar Mitzvah the McCourts were planning for their son Gavin would cost $500,000. The organization paid a $400,000 salary to one of their sons, who worked at Goldman Sachs, and $200,000 to another, a student at Stanford University, to do jobs with rather elusive duties. (The couple has never been able to explain to the press what those jobs entail.) Perhaps most shockingly, Frank and Jamie spent as much as $10,000 a month on a haircutter who tended to their locks five days a week. This was too much, even for Frank. “When I found that out, I couldn’t believe it,” he stated in court papers. (David Boies, Jamie’s lawyer, claims that Frank was not opposed to spending a lot of money on haircuts, and “the idea Frank was a frugal husband beset by a free-spending woman is insanity.”) The couple agreed to fire the hairdresser and hire a new one—at a mere $2,500 a month.

In all, the McCourts reportedly took $108 million out of the team in personal distributions over five years—a sum that Molly Knight, a reporter with ESPN who has extensively covered the story, notes is eerily similar to the cash payment that she says Frank McCourt has claimed he made for the team. Much of it was taken in the form of salaries, $5 million a year for Frank and eventually $2 million a year for Jamie. As Bill Shaikin reported in the Los Angeles Times, Frank also divided the stadium property into parcels and used the parking lots as collateral for a $60 million loan. He invested $10 million of that sum in the Dodgers, and used the rest for personal real-estate expenses.

By showing the business had operating losses, the McCourts paid no federal or state income taxes on that $108 million, causing outrage in L.A. when reported by Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times: “To everyone who claims that our wealthiest citizens pay more than their fair share of income taxes and we should cut them a break because they’re the ones who … create jobs in our economy, I have four words for you: Frank and Jamie McCourt.” (Frank disputes the $108 million figure and says the taxes were deferred.)

The McCourt advisers knew about these activities, it seems: “We have to get better at planning and try to avoid using the business as a savings account,” one of them told the couple, adding that they needed to address their “love-hate relationship with cash (love to have it, hate to keep it lying around).” But they seemed unable to get the couple to show any financial restraint. By 2009 the Dodgers had taken on an astonishing $459 million in debt.

The McCourts, particularly Jamie, were interested in making the social scene in Hollywood, and the upper-crust Angelenos they befriended (including former Fox-movie-studio head Sherry Lansing, and even Barbra Streisand, who sat in their box for a game) may have been aware of their grand lifestyle—but the hoi polloi, the Dodgers fans, were not. At first, it seemed as if the McCourts were a great fit for the team. They raised ticket prices a bit, and gouged fans on parking fees, but the payroll for players stayed up for the most part. Frank eventually put $150 million into upgrading the stadium, though he made improvements primarily in the luxury areas. He also seemed knowledgeable about the Dodgers and their history. “The Yankees may be about winning, and the Red Sox are lovable losers, but the Dodgers are about racial justice and integration, and were seen as a bastion of moral superiority,” says author Neal Pollack, who writes about the team for Slate. “Frank McCourt knew the nostalgia most of us have for that time, and when he came in, he said what fans wanted to hear. Then he proceeded to rob us blind.”

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The team finished first in the National League West during three of the first six years of the McCourts’ ownership, due partly to incredible hitting by Manny Ramirez, who propelled them to a division title before he tested positive in 2009 for a drug often used in conjunction with steroids. One does not know whether a Russian energy healer hired by the McCourts to send the team good vibes played into their success, as well. With some cost-cutting, the revenue of the team rose dramatically—in fact, it nearly doubled, from $156 million in 2004 to $290 million in 2009. (Many other baseball teams were going up in value, as well. Revenue for the league jumped from $3.6 billion in 2002 to $7 billion in 2010.)

As far as the business was concerned, Frank ran the back office, and Jamie the front office, where she pursued initiatives like having hottie outfielder Andre Ethier teach a women’s yoga class on the Dodgers’ diamond. The McCourts enjoyed the instant celebrity that came with owning the team, and hired a cadre of spin doctors to burnish their image. Jamie even made plans to write a memoir, entitled Screaming Meanie: Babes, Baseball and Business. She liked that L.A. was different from Boston, where “people are very interested in who was your father, who was your grandfather.” L.A. is a place where you’re judged by “where you’re going, not where you’ve been,” she said. “There isn’t a thing I don’t love about L.A. I’m never moving from L.A. Ev-ver.”

In the Dodgers’ offices, Jamie’s main ally was Charles Steinberg, a portly former dentist to the Baltimore Orioles who had re-created himself as a sports-marketing guru and was close to Selig; Jamie had hired him along with dozens of employees from the East Coast. “My speculation is she got out here, she finally realized what she wanted out of life, and the Dodger platform was a great way to get there, and Charles was a great enabler,” says a source close to Frank.

Steinberg even told Jamie she should get involved in politics. In a memo titled “Project Jamie: Tikun Olam Plan,” he told her that she should establish some goals: “1. To fix the world. 2. Fix America. 3. Be President.” He advised that she found a “Dodgers University” to further these goals, which would result in endorsements from Michelle Obama and L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and talked about what her “coalition” would be when she became involved in politics: “women, Latinos, African-Americans, sports loving males, [and those from the] Hollywood industries.” Another of Jamie’s advisers seconded the recommendation. “After you’ve planted all the appropriate seeds, I think that you can leverage your eventual star power to become Mayor of Los Angeles As long as a Magic Johnson-like celebrity doesn’t enter the race, you’ll win the mayoral seat Next step would be Governor. And if you get that far, well, let’s say that a female governor from California will be instantly added to anyone’s short list of presidential candidates Lots to talk about, but much more to get done, Madam President.”

Designated Hitter

Everything would likely have chugged along this way for a while if the McCourts’ marriage hadn’t fallen apart. The strain of the huge debt was affecting their relationship, which onlookers were already describing as increasingly bizarre—“You weren’t sure if you were in a sitcom or an Edward Albee play,” an image consultant to the McCourts reportedly said. The last straw was Jamie’s alleged affair with their younger, handsome blond California-boy driver, Jeff Fuller, who was paid by the Dodgers as “director of protocol.” Fuller had once worked as the driver for Barbara Davis, the oil heiress. “They took my driver,” Davis told V.F. special correspondent Bob Colacello in 2010. In court papers, Jamie says, “I would prefer not to address such accusations or to discuss my belief as to Frank’s extramarital activities.” Says an observer, “I’ve seen Frank hanging out at the bar at the Montage since he’s been living there, and let’s just say he doesn’t have great taste [in the company he keeps there].”

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Before this, Jamie and Frank had also started to butt heads over planning their estate. By 2008, the value of the Dodgers had appreciated tremendously—though they were still carrying a ton of debt—and Frank wanted to put money into a trust to pass the value on to their sons. The McCourts loved the idea that the Dodgers could become a family dynasty. But Jamie objected, arguing that she and Frank needed to be on better financial footing; after all, the seven properties they had bought when they came to L.A. might be worth half as much after the housing market went bust.

Jamie went to see the couple’s estate lawyer, Leah Bishop, about this issue, but claims she found herself in for a surprise—Frank was fully in control of all the Dodgers’ money. Bishop told her that she had signed away her rights to the team and its funds by agreeing to the post-nup. Bishop and Jamie now claim that Frank also expressed surprise at this situation, saying that he had never intended to cut Jamie off. (Frank’s side says he was expressing shock merely because the post-nup hadn’t been superseded by a will and that he always intended to be the sole owner of the Dodgers.)

It was tentatively agreed that Bishop would draft new documents in which all property would be equally shared. “Frank’s big mistake, which is a mistake he’s made throughout his life, was not saying no right then and there to Leah Bishop,” if he had misgivings about changing the post-nup, says a source close to Frank. “Instead, he said, ‘I’ll think about it.’ ” Jamie was very upset—if the Dodgers were solely Frank’s, her net worth would be about 15 percent of his, and that wasn’t any kind of equal marriage. “What happened there was pretty lousy,” says someone close to Jamie, giving her side of the story. “She’s the mother of four kids, been with her husband for 40 years, and then she realizes this person who was supposed to be her best friend was, well, screwing her, in so many words. It was a real heartbreak. Finally, it became clear to Jamie that Frank wanted her to always be there like, I don’t want to say a slave necessarily, but to just be along for the ride.”

Nevertheless, Frank wasn’t sure what to do. “I love my wife,” he reportedly said in court. “It’s as simple as that. She was trying very hard to convince me to sign the documents. She had basically put the marriage on the line.” Jamie was sending him lovey-dovey messages: “We have been enormously fortunate with our love, our health, our children, and our success together,” she wrote to him via e-mail. “I would really like to get this annoying estate work behind us What about this am I missing, because it really makes me feel that you don’t care about me? If we come through this troubling time in our lives, we should think about renewing our vows.”

After Frank became convinced that he was a man scorned, in October 2009, he must have wondered if Jamie had become so obsessed with estate planning because she was scheming to abscond with her new lover. Frank said he had “confirmation” of the affair and cut off discussions about changing the post-nup. Not only that—he decided that he wanted Jamie out of the Dodgers’ business entirely, along with Steinberg and about 70 staffers he perceived to be loyal to her, according to a source. “We had all gotten apartments and car loans, and moved 3,000 miles across the country, and then we were let go,” says Katy Phillips, a producer in the team’s media lab and one of the ex-employees with whom Frank does not have a non-disclosure agreement. On October 21, 2009, Frank sent Jamie a letter charging her with “insubordination, non-responsiveness, failure to follow procedures, and inappropriate behavior with regard to a direct subordinate.” She was fired as C.E.O. of the Dodgers, effective immediately.

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It could all have ended there, but Jamie isn’t the type to slink away. Despite the post-nup, she was adamant that she owned half of their fortune and half the team. Within a week, she filed for divorce, claiming “irreconcilable differences.” She wanted 50 percent of the team’s worth, which she estimated at $800 million, and half of the couple’s other assets, which she said were worth at least $1.2 billion. Frank claimed he had little personal wealth, and said the team’s value was much less, because of the debt.

Jamie also asked the court for spousal support to cover her expenses, such as private-jet travel, hair and makeup, and her half-dozen country-club memberships. She received an astonishing $225,000 a month, plus $412,159 per month for mortgages and other costs, like maids and gardeners, associated with the seven houses. She also received exclusive rights to use their Olympic pool, from six A.M. to two P.M. daily.

At that point it seemed that Jamie might settle the entire case, but, according to a source close to the negotiations, some of Frank’s initial offers—that he’d keep the Dodgers and she could have the houses, along with a cash payout of $35 to $40 million—were too low. Frank was still arguing that the Dodgers weren’t worth much, and he felt confident that with the post-nup Jamie would get nowhere in court. But when forensic experts started scrutinizing the actual documents, Frank’s luck began to turn. The McCourts’ lawyer, Larry Silverstein, had had the couple sign six copies of the post-nup. Frank signed three at their home in Boston and another three in Los Angeles two weeks later, because Silverstein felt that it would be safer to have some copies of the agreement signed in California. Exhibit A, in all six copies, assigned the Dodgers and all other property, except for the homes, to Frank. The page before Exhibit A was a signature page, so the forensic experts thought that there should be indentations from those signatures on all of the copies of Exhibit A. But there weren’t.

In fact, none of the three copies signed in Los Angeles had any indentations, and there was evidence that some sort of clip had previously been affixed to them, and perhaps a note as well. When Jamie’s lawyers began looking through Silverstein’s files, they found the mother of all snafus. Silverstein, it seemed, had inadvertently allowed the McCourts to sign three of the six documents with an error in the exhibit: instead of saying that Frank was the sole owner of all their property “inclusive” of the Dodgers, the L.A. copies said that he was the owner of all property “exclusive” of the Dodgers. Silverstein eventually caught the mistake, which he claims was a simple drafting error, but instead of having the McCourts sign corrected documents, he simply switched out the exhibits for ones with the correct language. It was a decision made for efficiency’s sake—but it cost Frank the case against Jamie, at least in part. The post-nup was thrown out in December 2010.

According to a source close to the case, after he lost on the post-nup, Frank again offered Jamie the houses plus an increased cash payment of between $100 and $120 million, but he absolutely would not give her any part of the team. Jamie wasn’t going to accept that. And during the course of the trial, deep resentment set in. “For these two people, who were together for more than three decades, whose business, professional, and personal lives were intertwined, they were actually enormously positive about each other at first,” says Boies. “They respected each other and thought the other was smart and imaginative—frankly, I don’t think that either had given up hope on the marriage. It was an interesting, and unfortunate, deterioration from there.”

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Jamie, who was always skinny, began to lose even more weight. “She’s like a lollipop,” says a friend. “Women in our community have been giving her a break even though she had an affair, but the men are really mad at Frank for what he’s done to the Dodgers franchise—they think he thought this was a good city to come and put one over on anybody. But no one sees either of them as one of our own.”

Jamie has tried to rehabilitate her image. According to a friend, she put on exclusive wine dinners for 12 friends (her pals include Wendy Goldberg, the wife of producer Leonard Goldberg, and Florence Sloan, the wife of an ex-head of MGM), several times a month. Frank, on the other hand, continued to slip in everyone’s estimation. “For the billionaires along the beach in Malibu, there’s a pretty big distinction: Frank is [widely disliked], and Jamie is [seen as] kind of sweet and a little bit kooky,” says a friend of Jamie’s. Nevertheless, Jamie has become more and more nervous about her future. “She’s always shaking, like a shaking dog,” says a friend. “She knows she’s in the fight of her life.”

Bottom of the Ninth

Jamie began to receive calls from investors interested in partnering with her to buy the team out from under Frank—she knew that the fans didn’t want her as the face of the Dodgers anymore, but she could be a good silent partner—but time and again, sources close to her claim, investors disappeared because Frank wouldn’t produce any financial information about the team. In fact, Frank refused even to tell Jamie exactly how much he thought the Dodgers were worth. “We were saying that the Dodgers were worth more than a billion dollars, and Frank once took the position that they were only worth a few hundred million dollars, and after the debt was subtracted, they might only be worth $1 or $2 million,” says Boies. Says a source close to the situation, “At one point Jamie said to Frank, ‘We’re so exhausted from dealing with you … that we’ll take the cash, but if you can’t get us the cash within a reasonable period of time, then you have to agree to sell the team and divide up the proceeds,’ and his response was ‘That’s so ludicrous we’re not even going to bother responding.’ ” The source sighs. “He has no money, so what is the point of agreeing to take cash if he’s unwilling to provide any mechanism to actually pay Jamie?”

But even as Frank was struggling to make payments on the Dodgers’ crushing debt, Jamie knew that the team most likely had value way beyond the essential assets of the team and its property. Frank had worked on different plans to leverage the team’s value: In 2005 he had come up with a plan called “Five Ton Gorilla” to put an N.F.L. stadium and retail complex in the Dodgers’ parking lot, with the backing of Larry Silverstein (no relation to the lawyer), the New York real-estate developer who owns much of the World Trade Center site. This failed because at the time L.A.’s civic leaders were lining up behind a plan to bring the N.F.L. to the Coliseum, so, in 2008, Frank launched a campaign to create a “promenade”—i.e., mall—on the Dodgers’ land, with restaurants, shops, and a Dodgers museum in the area behind the outfield, at a cost of $500 million. One problem: no one would finance it.

Even though these plans failed, Frank had an ace up his sleeve: the television rights for the team, which were coming up for renegotiation in 2013. And Fox was ready to make a deal: in February 2011, the network was shocked when Time Warner grabbed the Lakers away from it in a 20-year deal worth a rumored $3 billion. Now Fox was desperate for the Dodgers, and they knew they could extract a good price from Frank, one he wouldn’t have otherwise taken, because he was so hungry for cash.

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This was a bad trade, from Jamie’s perspective. The big money had always been in creating a new Dodgers network, and Frank was throwing that away to pay the bills. A source close to Frank has suggested that part of why Jamie has been counseled by David Boies and a hedge-fund adviser named Joe Ravitch—both of whom were instrumental in the creation of the Yankees’ multi-billion deal to create the YES network, their own network in New York—was because she always had her eye on this prize. (Boies denies this.)

Nevertheless, Frank and Fox struck a tentative deal a month later: for somewhere in the range of $1.7 to $3 billion, Frank agreed to give Fox the right to broadcast the Dodgers for the next 20 years—but the network had to give him a $375 million up-front payment. He needed that money.

This deal had to first be approved by Major League Baseball, and in the interim, Frank was sweating the April payroll. So he arranged for a loan from Fox—a personal loan of $30 million to help him fund the team through April 15. He figured that if he didn’t take it through the team, M.L.B. wouldn’t have any reason to object.

He was wrong. Selig was livid. “Getting a personal loan is one thing, but a loan from the company that broadcasts your team and almost every other team in baseball?” says Leitch, the founder of Deadspin. “That’s unacceptable. Selig negotiates with the major TV partner for the league, and he needs to know about that. If the loan was from a local car dealership, Selig wouldn’t have been nearly as mad.”

Within a few days, Selig declared that he was taking over the Dodgers’ finances. He may also have been swayed by a letter from Jamie reminding him that, since she was likely a part owner of the team, any deal that Frank had struck for 20-year media rights with Fox might be invalidated by the courts, because she wasn’t sure whether she was going to sign it. Ryan Kirkpatrick, a lawyer for Frank, says, “M.L.B. knew everything about the Dodgers’ financial situation. But after the post-nup was invalidated, they grew uncomfortable with the ongoing divorce and the publication of Major League Baseball data, and decided that they needed to do something to step in so the divorce didn’t linger.”

Today, Selig seems more than ready to seize the team from Frank, once the forensic audit that he has ordered is over. He’s within his rights to do so, as long as he can get three-quarters of M.L.B.’s owners to vote with him to sell the franchise to someone else. “There are good baseball owners and bad baseball owners, but Frank McCourt really stands by himself in terms of destroying a marquee franchise through extravagance, inappropriate expenditures, and financial commitments,” says Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist at Smith College. “As far as I’m concerned, the chances that Selig couldn’t get three-quarters of the owners to vote with him on this are the same chances of peace breaking out in the Middle East in the next few weeks.”

For once, Jamie and Frank were on the same side: Jamie was feverishly trying to make sure that the team wasn’t seized by M.L.B., convinced that, if it was, Selig would sell to whomever he thought was easiest to control, instead of to the highest bidder. She went to court to ask for the immediate sale of the Dodgers so the couple could control the process, instead of M.L.B. The parties tentatively settled on June 17, but this issue and others have yet to be resolved. If M.L.B. approves Frank’s TV deal with Fox, Judge Scott Gordon plans to rule in a one-day trial, on August 4, on who owns how much of the team.

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Meanwhile, Frank has developed a slew of new problems: a Dodger relief pitcher is on the disabled list with an anxiety disorder and the rest of the team isn’t doing well; two fires recently broke out at the stadium; and, most notably, an off-duty paramedic from Santa Cruz was beat to a pulp in a poorly lit parking lot of the stadium—an incident that was laid at McCourt’s feet, since he had let go of the Dodgers’ chief of security four months earlier. The family of the victim (he’s still in a coma) is suing the Dodgers and McCourt for millions.

On top of that, Silverstein’s firm announced that Frank owes them hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid fees, and it asked a court to declare that he can’t sue them for malpractice for screwing up his post-nup. By the way, the $10,000 a month haircutter is suing him for unpaid fees, too.

That’s the Ball Game

If fate had shined differently upon the McCourts—if they had never gotten divorced, and financial disclosures in the case hadn’t turned them into pariahs, and they were heralded as geniuses for creating a new Dodgers network—they would probably have still owned the Dodgers, with billions of dollars to share between them. But today, there are only a few ways the curtain can fall on this sordid saga. Frank could find a minority partner (a hedge-fund owner like David Einhorn) to bail him out, but that’s unlikely, given his current reputation. Or he could declare bankruptcy—“it might happen, because Frank is obstinate, irrational, and stubborn,” says a source close to the situation. “He’s acting like a financial suicide bomber.” (A spokesman for Frank calls this characterization “inaccurate and irresponsible.”)

Now that Frank and Jamie have finally settled, the two of them most likely will try to get M.L.B. to approve some version of the Fox deal. But even then, Selig may not allow them to remain the owners. “I think Frank thinks he will get to keep the team if he settles, but I’m sure Selig has already made up his mind,” says Knight of ESPN.

Even with the team in M.L.B.’s hands, that doesn’t mean that Frank won’t sue them and everyone else in sight. Most likely there are many more arguments, and more court dates, to come. And Jamie is exhausted. “At this point, all Jamie wants out of this is enough money to keep her houses in L.A., and live comfortably, and never have to deal with this again,” says the close source.

As far as the Dodgers are concerned, they have a chance of regaining their former shine under new owners. Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio, Boston Red Sox chairman Tom Werner, and Chicago White Sox executive Dennis Gilbert, all of whom live in the Los Angeles area, have been floated as possible bidders for the franchise. Steve Garvey, an eight-time all-star for the Dodgers, has started an investor group with supermarket magnate Ron Burkle, who bought the N.H.L.’s Pittsburgh Penguins with Mario Lemieux in 1999.

What is not in question is that the new owner will be from Southern California. “One thing the M.L.B. wants is someone who has their finger on the pulse of our region,” says David Carter, of the Sports Business Institute at the University of Southern California. “They don’t want any more out-of-towners taking over the Dodgers.”